The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
Large enterprise organizations often maintain many different web servers and web sites that provide comprehensive user access to their goods and services. For such organizations, web site maintenance can involve the constant deployment, testing, and updating of a multitude of web sites and web pages, and often requires a dedicated information technology (IT) department within the company. For a company that maintains many web servers and sites, such maintenance tasks can represent a high overhead burden for the IT resources of the company.
Web sites are generally accessed by users entering domain names, such as “www.salesforce.com” into a web browser. Internet connections do not work directly with domain names, so domain names are converted into corresponding IP (Internet Protocol) addresses (e.g., “192.168.1.1”) by a domain name resolution process. Operating systems usually include a “hosts” file, or similar file, to map domain names to corresponding IP addresses. The hosts file is typically a plain-text file that identifies and locates a web site host in an IP network by translating the human-friendly domain names into numeric IP addresses. A typical hosts file contains lines of text consisting of an IP address in the first text field followed by one or more hostnames (domain names) with comment lines that may be included. Unlike other domain name resolution systems, such as the Domain Name System (DNS), the hosts file is usually under the direct control of the local computer's administrator. Modifying the hosts file to add, delete, change, or update web servers in the system, thus requires direct manual input by the system administrator or other IT personnel.
It is clearly desirable to test web sites prior to deployment in order verify functionality and to minimize the risk of user dissatisfaction. Under present domain name resolution systems and web server testing methods, testing arbitrary web sites that are known only to a locally running server software program requires either manual modifications to the system's hosts file or a special DNS server that returns the “localhost” Internet protocol (IP) address for unknown names. Modifying the system's hosts file (e.g., /etc/hosts), requires that all hostnames that the tester wants to test be listed in that file to resolve to the “localhost” IP address. Running a specially configured DNS server requires either creating or modifying an existing DNS server program to return the localhost IP address instead of an error message or “not-found” message for the DNS domain names that are not known. Requiring manual modification of the hosts file in this manner can impose an unacceptable burden to an organization if there are many web sites to maintain and test at any one time.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide techniques enabling efficient testing of multiple web sites and/or web servers without requiring manual modification of operating system hosts files.